Saturday, 18 August 2007

Why I've Started Renting Games Again

This week, I rented Harry Potter Order of the Phoenix on the Xbox 360 from my local Blockbuster Videos. It cost me £4.95 to rent it for two nights (or three days, I suppose). I managed to finish the game in those two evenings (with the help of my games mistress friend Bibi) and returned it on the third day, happy that I hadn't spent £49.99 on it only to never play it again.

The last game I rented before this was Pokémon Stadium on the N64. Back then, rentals were cheaper and I think I got the little snazzy Gameboy adaptor thing to upload my Pokemon from Red/Blue. Regardless, since then I've owned a Dreamcast, a Playstation 2, a Gamecube, an Xbox, a Nintendo DS, an Xbox360 and a Nintendo Wii and NOT ONCE have I rented a game. I suppose I got a bit materialistic about my games and HAD to actually own them. I even stopped part-exchanging them, as I couldn't bare the thought of my games collection shrinking after I'd put so much money into expanding it. But just recently, my habits have changed. I HAVE been part-exchanging my old games to buy lovely new ones. And I finally took the step into renting a game for the first time in eight years...

I played the demo of Harry Potter and quite enjoyed it. I'm a bit of a Potter geek and I absolutely loved the new film, so was pretty keen to play the game too. But I KNEW in my heart that it'd only be about six hours long (it's a film license, after all. And made by EA...), have no online multiplayer or Live content to speak of, and probably have little replay value. I still reckon I would've bought it if I could have found it for under twenty quid, but it's pretty much full price everywhere due to Potter-mania sweeping the country.

So I rented it. A fiver and two LONG evening later, me and Bibi finished the game, happy that I was £44.99 richer than I would be had I bought it. I returned it yesterday morning and have had NO desire to play it again since. So I guess I was right! I had two lovely evenings with it. It's a great little game if you're a fan of the Harry Potter books and/or films. It sticks really close to events in the films, although it skips around far too erratically.